a woman, her daughter, and a great wide world

House Work Challenge

Someone tipped me off to this oddly rediculus article today which includes the following statement:

They found that young single women did the least amount of housework, at about 12 hours a week. Married women in their 60 and 70s did nearly twice that amount, while women with more than three children spent 28 hours a week cleaning, cooking and washing.

I honestly did a little double-take. 24 hours of housework every week?! Am I just exceedingly lazy or do these people scrub their kitchen with a toothbrush every night before bed?

Even with a toddler in cloth diapers, a refusal to use paper towels (hello laundry!), and being home all day, I still don’t think I go over maybe fifteen. But maybe it’s because I never do my dishes until a week later.

In honor of this article and all the other subjects that people waste their time studying, I would like to propose a challenge to you, my lovely readers…

Starting today, Monday the 7th (or whenever you read this post) time your “cleaning, cooking and washing” for seven days. It can be approximate, clearly I’m not a stickler for seconds. You shouldn’t include things like bills or yard work. Just the cooking, cleaning and washing. And don’t include the length of time the machine is running. For example, if you use a dishwasher, include the time it takes to load and unload, but not the actual running of the washer because technically you weren’t actually doing the work. I think folding and ironing should be included in washing (Madame who irons her sheets, you know who you are!!) as should things like making your bed be included in cleaning.

I prefer to be extra lazy tonight, so I will start tomorrow morning, and will post the results on Tuesday of next week.

Let the games begin!

ps – don’t hold it against me that this post has several spelling mistakes. WordPress has a spellchecker bug and I’m too lazy to go look up the word rediculous in the dictionary.

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6 Responses

I’m not sure I spend 12hrs a MONTH cleaning…really what would be the point? My four year old is just going to pull everything back out anyway. Although, we do like to cook…so maybe we can bulk up our time a bit in that catagory…

I’m a little worried to time myself, though maybe if I do, I’ll feel better, I’ll feel like I clean more then I realize. Though timing might be hard, because the one thing I seem to do all day is pick things up… we’ll see, I’ll do my best!

I have already done this once. I wonder if things will change now that I’m “single again”.

When I was married, I spent 45 hours a week, working for pay, about 25 hours a week doing childcare (far less than stay at home moms and far less than I would like) and 20 hours a week doing housework. That includes: cleaning the bathrooms, dusting, vaccuuming, cleaning the kitchen and the dining room table, putting in laundry, taking it out and folding it, preparing meals 9 times a week, putting together L’s bags and lunches for her “school” days, loading and emptying the dishwasher and doing some dishes by hand. If you also include shopping and putting away groceries, you can probably jack it up to 25, easy.

OK, I tried to do this last week, and I totally lost track (certain people interrupt a lot, don’t they? I didn’t realize just how much until I was on the clock….), but I promise you, my final count will be an infinitesimally small number of hours (I pride myself on the Three Minute Cleanup, and I actually set my watch for it so I don’t accidentally do four minutes.)

I’ll keep track again this week and let you know. I’ve wondered about those types of stats, too….